Page:The Agitator Volume 2 Issue 04.djvu/2

THE AGITATOR

Issued twice a month, on the first and fifteenth, by Publishing Association from its printing office in Home, Wash.

Entered at the postoffice at Lakebay,Wash., as Second Class Matter

Subscription, One Dollar a Year. Two copies to one address $1.50.

Address all communications and make all money orders payable to, Lakebay, Wash.

Articles for publication should be written on one side of the paper only.

does not bear the union stamp because it is not printed for profit. But it is union, every letter of it. It is printed and published by unionists and their friends for the economic and political education of themselves and their fellow toilers. Much of the labor is given free. On the whole it is a work of love—the love of the idea, of a world fit for the free.

People are rich, not in the fact of their possessing great wealth, bat in the degree to which they possess freedom.

THE FRISCO BALL

The "Hobos" of Frisco who are after the "whole cheese" and know how to get it, gave a dance, where rags were respectable, for the benefit of.

A hundred dollars is the result. We hope 's friends elsewhere will^be inspired by this splendid effort to arrange some sort of entertainment for it.

Comrade Ross Winn, the indefatigable propagandist, has "bobbed up" again as editor and publisher of "The Advance, a Monthly Free Lance;" Sixteen pages of brain stirring stuff that will tear the moss from your mind.

50c. a year. Mount Juliet, Tenn.

Arther Jensen, well known in Seattle's radical ranks, has started "The Coal Digger," a four page weekly, for the miners in particular, and labor in general. Every miner in the state shud read the "Digger." It digs to the root of economic wrong, $1.50 a year. Wilkeson, Wash.

Nov. 15, 1911.

Editor Freie Arbeiter Stimme,

30 Canal St., New York City:

Comrade Yanovsky—In acknowledging receipt of $11.00 subscribed to the Defense Fund by the subscribers to the Freie Arbeiter Stimme, and thanking you for the same, I beg to state my opinion that you do not seem to realize the fu~ gravity of the case.

Your editorial attitude has been that of one cooly indifferent to the matter. You seem to regard it a3 merely a local affair, quite beneath your editorial attention; and I do not wonder that several of your subscribers are finding fault with you on that account. Your attitude is well illustrated in your answer to Comrade Alexander's inquiry when you write: "The one who understands the fight to be an important one will give. The one who don't won't give," and you advise him not to lose his temper.

Now, I cannot for the life of me see how an Anarchist editor, a propagandist in the cause of freedom, can sit tack in his chair and assume the cool indifference of a bourgois, and advise his justly indignant subscribers to keep cool, while the very liberty that enables him to publish his paper is being ground under the iron heel of governmental tyranny.

You surely must see the importance of holding on to the speck of liberty which enables us to publish our views to the world, and I am sure you do not consciously mean to stand idly by and let others fight to maintain that little liberty, without giving a helping hand. Yet the attitude of indifference you have assumed in this case points directly to that conclusion.

Lest you should by laboring under a misapprehension of the gravity of the case, wihchwhich [sic] I really believe you are, I will re-state, briefly, its important points:

I am charged with "publishing matter tending to create disrespect for law.". The subject of the article cited as "criminal" has no bearing on the question. That it happens to be one of those written in relation to the bathing persecutions at Home, is merely incidental. Any issue of The Agitator contains matter that could just as well have been cited. For you can easily see that any criticism of the law or of the courts could be construed as "tending to create disrespect for law," and here lies the profound importance of the case.

If it was merely a local issue with little or no bearing on the broader question of freedom, I should not ask nor expect more than passing notice of it.

It is not my opinion, merely, that this is a vital issue. I submit for your consideration Comrade Jas. F. Morton's article in the Truth Seeker of Oct. 14th, and Theo. Schroeder, attorney for the New York Free Speech League, has pronounced it of so much importance as to suggest that it should be taken to the United States Supreme Court.

Now, if you take the stand that we should not fight the case in the courts, and that I tamely submit to being railroaded to the penitentiary without making any defense, it is. quite another thing, and you should so state it—giving ample argument in support of your position.

Personally, I am quite averse to dealing with the law, and am ready to go to jail for my opinions without annoying the general public with my troubles. But I cannot see the logic of a Revolutionist laying down and submitting to the courts as soon as he is gathered into its meshes. Such conduct would be consistent for a Tolstoyian, but a Revolutionist will never give up the fight.

Besides, this is not a personal matter. It is a country wide issue, and on our conduct of it will depend in large measure the conduct of similar cases in the future.

The Free Speech League believes that every obstacle should be cast in the way of the capitalist opponents of free expression before submitting and that the widest publicity be given every such case, that public attention may be awakened and that what little freedom of speech we have should not be surrendered without a stubborn fight.

I trust that this statement of the case will make plain to you the vital importance of its receiving the serious attention of all lovers of freedom; of all those who have something to say in condemnation of the present system of wage and law slavery that is little by little throttling the workers in its iron grip.

Unless we defend this liberty now all our papers will soon have to pass through the hands of an official censor.

Yours in the Cause of Freedom, JAY FOX.

You can understand that we would treat your case broad and wide did we really think as you and Morton thinks about it. But that is just the thing—at least for the present—we think it a mere trifle, and we hate to make an elephant out of a fly.

The foregoing answer appeared in the "Letter Box" of the F. A. S., and it reminds me very forcibly of the adage: "None are half so blind as those who will not I see." That's all. I would insult the reader's intelligence to comment further on such a pusillanimous utterance.

This "Revolutionist" dared not publish my letter and meet its arguments. I leave him exposed to the radical world as a "four flusher." J. F.

The McNamaras have been sent to prison. J. B. for life and J. J. for 15 years.

Lincoln Steffens, who brought about the settlement of the case, says:

"The McNamaras think they are fighters in a war, and they are.

"The beginning of the story was at the ranch of E. W. Scripps, on Sunday, Nov. 19. I went there with Clarence S. Darrow, and we talked, all three of us, about everything under the sun, and finally about the McNamara case. Mr. Scripps read a letter about the belief that force and violence are the only weapons Labor has to fight with. We could all see that if this case could be tried so as to develop that theory as a defense, this terrible, true fact could be brought out into the light and dealt with. Some one else suggested that another way to accomplish the same end was to settle the McNamara cases on the basis of a plea of guilty. Such a plea would give us all a chance to assume that a part of organized labor had actually adopted the policy of force."

The day after the confession, he wrote:

"The spirit of wrath which is disgracing this city and this country today is the spirit that moved the McNamara boys to plant the dynamite to blow up the Times building. They also talk of justice, justice for their class, and they belong to a Labor group which not only says but believes that the only way for Labor to get justice is to fight for it by strikes, with dynamite, by force, by war. They are not right, are they? I wouldn't have asked such a question yesterday, but since everybody else is throwing bombs, why shouldn't I throw one, too? Why shouldn't I ask and why shouldn't I ask everybody else to ask himself: Isn't this group right? Isn't force the only way? Isn't the demand of society for revenge upon the dynamiters very like the demand of these men for revenge upon society?

The Executive Council of the A. F. of L. has issued a long statement apologizing for its connection with the McNamara defense, from which we quote:

"The men of organized labor, in common with all our people, are grieved beyond expression in words at the loss of life, and the destruction of property, not only in the case under discussion, but in any other case which may have occurred. We are hurt and humiliated to think that any man connected with the labor movement should have been guilty of either. The lesson this grave crime teaches will, however, have its salutatory effect. It will demonstrate now more than ever the inhumanity, as well as the futility, of resorting to violence in the effort to right wrongs, or to attain rights.

Clarence S. Darrow, chief counsel for the defense, made a statement, part of which follows:

"Whether they were right or wrong, they believed, they were on the fighting line. They were not murderers at heart, but they were destroyers of property. Jim McNamara did not intend to kill anybody, his dynamite broke the gas main. And that is the plight I found him in. He told me the truth about it all. Because he wasn't a murderer at heart I decided to do the best I could to save his life.

"All my life I have tried to be on the side of those who lose in the unequal fight between the rich. and the poor. Here was a man who, whether in the right or wrong, tried in his own grim way to be a soldier on the same side—the side of the poor. I couldn't see him go down without giving him what help I could. I know there are many Americans who will not understand what I have done, who will be able to analyze the spirit in which I did it. I know that I took the only possible chance there was of saving McNamara's life."

Private property—the possession of things—is the death of progress. The ownership of things enslaves us, they chain us to one place; we become conservatives; we must conserve our possessions.

A rebel has no time or place for property; it is a snare, an unnecessary responsibility; a troublesome obligation; and respectabilities and obligations are two of the subtlest remnants of a rotten, capitalistic moral system.

The surest way to have a thing done is to do it yourself; the quickest way to do away with the sacredness of property is to begin at home.

My books, my furniture, my house, estranges me from him who forgets to whom they belong. Am I then a free man?

We are no better than the religious folks who sing and talk of the home over there; we talk of the good day coming when men shall be free and keep on putting off the day by worshipping at the shrine of sacred private property.

Whenever I sell my time to be able to buy things I can call my own, I add to my responsibilities, I add to the impediments already strewn on the path to freedom.

Who then will buy the books, the pictures, the luxuries I use? As far as possible I will, but I will have no brain-storm in case you think you need them more than I; I shall buy nothing that I cannot afford to lose, that I cannot leave behind, nothing that has not been made possible by the united effort, the united intelligence, the united needs of all—nothing so sacred that I cannot share it with you if you choose to use it.

To have nothing is to have all things, to be free from the possession of things is to be unpossessed.

S. T. HAMMERSMARK.